A Spinal MRI Image Segmentation Method Based on Improved Swin-UNet

ABSTRACT

As the number of patients increases, physicians are dealing with more and more cases of degenerative spine pathologies on a daily basis. To reduce the workload of healthcare professionals, we propose a modified Swin-UNet network model. Firstly, the Swin Transformer Blocks are improved using a residual post-normalization and scaling cosine attention mechanism, which makes the training process of the model more stable and improves the accuracy. Secondly, we use the log-space continuous position biasing method instead of the bicubic interpolation position biasing method. This method solves the problem of performance loss caused by the large difference between the resolution of the pretraining image and the resolution of the spine image. Finally, we introduce a segmentation smooth module (SSM) at the decoder stage. The SSM effectively reduces redundancy, and enhances the segmentation edge processing to improve the model’s segmentation accuracy. To validate the proposed method, we conducted experiments on a real dataset provided by hospitals. The average segmentation accuracy is no less than 95%. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the original model and other models of the same type in segmenting the spinous processes of the vertebrae and the posterior arch of the spine.

KEYWORDS:

• MRI
• degenerative spine pathologies
• spine segmentation
• self-attention
• transformer
• Swin-UNet

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the Science and Technology Project of the Jilin Provincial Education Department (JJKH20230134KJ).

Disclosure statement

We declare that we do not have any commercial or associative interest that represents a conflict of interest in connection with the work submitted.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Science and Technology Project of the Jilin Provincial Education Department [JJKH20230134KJ].